If you're looking to build a gaming PC but want to spend as little as possible - we're talking about $500 or less - AMD has just released two seriously interesting products that look set to beat Intel at the low-end and offer those on super-tight budgets a way to get into PC gaming for very low amounts of cash.

The Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G are what's called APUs - CPUs with a capable onboard graphics processor and despite the fact they offer gaming performance on par with $50-100 discrete GPUs, they're available from just $99. I'll be reviewing both in this article and you can see the full results on the next few pages.

AMD confirmed details of its Zen-based APUs with Radeon RX Vega Graphics back in January, and since then we've been keenly-awaiting the company's first desktop products with onboard graphics under the Ryzen brand - all the rest have been CPUs that required a discrete graphics card.

The company has had some success here in the past too, with FX-series APUs offering acceptable performance in games at low settings, removing the need for a separate graphics card for those on tight budgets. The fact that, in the case of the Ryzen 5 2400G And Ryzen 3 2200G I'm looking at today, we're talking about Radeon RX Vega graphics built-in, means that there's no need to buy a discrete graphics card if you'll be gaming at low resolutions and detail settings, meaning you can save up to $100.

Both APUs come with a Wraith coolerAntony Leather

Until Ryzen and the Zen architecture arrived last year, AMD's performance elsewhere was lacking, so the fact its two new APUs sport full-fat Ryzen quad-core CPUs under the hood means you get plenty of grunt outside of games too. The Ryzen 5 2400G even supports Simultaneous Multithreading, so you get eight threads as well as four cores too - that's the same as the Ryzen 5 1500X which costs the same price but lacks any onboard graphics.

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

AMD Ryzen 5 1400

AMD Radeon RX 560

AMD Radeon RX 550

Price

$169

$99

$149

-

-

CPU cores

4 Cores, 8 Threads

4 Cores, 4 Threads

4 Cores, 8 Threads

-

-

Base Clock

3.6GHz

3.5GHz

3.2GHz

-

-

Max Boost Clock

3.9GHz

3.7GHz

3.45GHz

-

-

GPU Cores

11 Compute units

8 Compute units

-

16 Compute units

8 Compute units

GPU Clock max

1250MHz

1100MHz

-

1275MHz

1183MHz

L2 cache

2MB

2MB

2MB

-

-

L3 cache

4MB

4MB

8MB

-

-

TDP

65W

65W

65W

75W

50W

PCI-E lanes

x8

x8

x16

-

-

The above table includes details not just for the Ryzen 5 1400 CPU, but also for the RX 560 and RX 550 graphics cards so you can compare their specifications to those of the new APU's Vega-based graphics processors. The clock speeds are similar, but the RX 560 has a clear lead in compute units. However, you can probably expect the Ryzen 5 2400G to offer the $100 RX 550 some competition in most games, with its onboard GPU sporting three extra CUs and a faster GPU core frequency.

Two notable limitations of the new APUs compared to their older Ryzen counterparts are the number of PCI-E lanes available for the GPU - just eight compared to the usual 16, plus the L3 cache is half that of the Ryzen 5 1400 at just 4MB. However, the new APUs sport AMD's improved boosting technology - Precision Boost 2, which promises to increase performance particularly in lightly-threaded workloads.

Now, let's get one thing straight. We're not looking at a monstrously powerful graphics processor here. The Ryzen 5 2400G only has 11 compute units meaning it's going to be competing roughly with AMD's RX 550, RX 560 and Nvidia's GTX 1030 - the latter I managed to get hold of in time for this review and you can see how it compares in the graphs later on.

Ryzen meets VegaAMD

What this does mean, is that if you're hoping to play recent demanding 3D games at 1,920 x 1,080 at maximum detail settings, you're going to be disappointed. You'd still need to splash out a few hundred dollars to get something like a GTX 1060 before you get silky smooth frame rates in many of today's 3D titles. Unsurprisingly, the GTX 1060 currently tops Valve's hardware survey as having the biggest market share of any graphics card at the moment.

However, at the low end of the spectrum, and indeed getting into the top 15 most-popular graphics cards in the survey are plenty of low-end options that include the likes of Intel HD graphics, Nvidia's GeForce GT 730 and AMD's Radeon R7 series. If you're gaming on something similar, you'll probably be well-versed in tuning down your game settings and you may even be gaming at resolutions lower than 1080p too.

This is where the $169 Ryzen 5 2400G and $99 Ryzen 3 2200G come in. Not only do they offer similar pixel-pushing grunt to your typical $50-$100 discrete GPU, but they cost about the same as AMD's GPU-less options, namely the Ryzen 5 1400 and 1500X. That's pretty interesting when you consider you're getting a capable graphics processor too, especially as something equivalent will, as I've mentioned, set you back a further $50-100.

Intel's Core i3 8100 sits in around the $120 mark, but as most of us know, even though it does sport onboard graphics, it's nowhere near enough to handle modern 3D gaming, even at low settings.

Test setup

I used AMD's Ryzen Processor with Radeon Vega Graphics press kit, which included a Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G plus the Wraith cooler, which will be included with retail CPUs too. I also used MSI's B350I Pro AC motherboard, a Corsair AX860i PSU and Corsair 16GB 3,000MHz Vengeance LPX memory. I used an Intel stock cooler and Gigabyte Z370N-WiFi motherboard with the same memory and PSU and a Samsung 960 Pro M.2 SSD was used in all test systems.

To test the Nvidia GTX 1030, I simply disabled the onboard Vega graphics and used a PCI-E EVGA GTX 1030 2GB. I should also add that I increased the onboard memory limit for the Vega GPU to the maximum allowed 2GB in all tests.

Performance

Unigine Superposition benchmarkAntony Leather

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided benchmarkAntony Leather

Fallout 4 benchmarkAntony Leather

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation benchmarkAntony Leather

System power consumption loadAntony Leather

System power consumption - idleAntony Leather

Cinebench R15 multi-threaded benchmarkAntony Leather

Cinebench R15 single-core benchmarkAntony Leather

Performance discussion

As expected, the Intel CPU's onboard graphics is never even in contention in games, but elsewhere it offers similar grunt to the Core i3-8100. The Nvidia GTX 1030, paired with the Ryzen 5 2400G with the onboard Vega GPU disabled for a direct comparison, does beat the Vega GPU under the hood, but you'll be paying an extra $100 for the privilege - a significant amount when you're budget is around $400-500.

For example, you gain less than 10% performance in Unigine Superposition, and the minimum frame rate increased from 25fps to 30fps in Fallout 4 at 1080p and medium settings, with Deus Ex seeing it rise from 23fps to 27fps.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400GAntony Leather

Once I'd overclocked the CPU and GPU portions of the Ryzen 5 2400G (the CPU to an all-core overclock of 3.85GHz and GPU to 1,300MHz), this saw it nearly match the GTX 1030 system in Deus Ex, and come within spitting distance in Unigine Superposition too, although admittedly Fallout 4 didn't see much improvement.

There doesn't seem to be a way to beat AMD here either - even if you opt for a much cheaper CPU such as a Ryzen 3 1200 or Core i3-8100, you're still looking at spending between $30-$50 more overall and as the Ryzen 5 2400G also includes double the threads of either of those CPUs, you'll be losing out on multi-threaded performance as well as spending more.

That performance is pretty evident too - the Core i3-8100 scored 599 in Cinebench R15 while the Ryzen 5 2400G reached 823. Thanks to improvements from Precision Boost 2, this score also matches the Ryzen 5 1500X despite having a quarter of the L3 cache. This bodes well for Ryzen's second-generation CPUs due out soon.

AMD Ryzen with Radeon Vega graphicsAntony Leather

Conclusions

If you have a budget of around $500 for a PC, then AMD's new APUs should be top of your list of options when it comes to CPUs and graphics cards. They obviously don't have the grunt to deal with modern games at maximum settings at 1080p and above, but they stand up well to typical $50-100 discrete graphics cards meaning that's money you can save or put towards something else.

The stock cooler coped fine too, even when they were overclocked, so there's little need to opt for a third party cooler either and, of course, as most AM4 motherboards include a PCI-E slot, you can drop in a discrete card at a later date. There is the small issue of both APUs being limited to eight lanes when it comes to PCI-E graphics cards, but you'd have to be considering a high-end GPU before this even remotely becomes an issue. Even with a GTX 1080, the performance drop going from 16x to 8x is less than 1% in a majority of games.

Overall the APUs are a resounding success for AMD, offering decent performance outside of games compared to comparative Ryzen and Intel CPUs, while offering low budget gamers a cost-saving way to own a gaming PC. You're not going to be gaming at 1080p at maximum settings in demanding modern 3D titles with smooth frame rates, but you won't be doing that with a GTX 1030 or RX 550 either.

I’m a technology journalist with a 20-year interest in PCs and I've been writing about PC hardware for a decade in publications such as bit-tech.net and Custom PC magazine. I’ve been building and modifying PCs for 20 years, with a keen interest in liquid cooling and PC moddi...